


the book of secrets

by traveller



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-15
Updated: 2005-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:16:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>A legend is but an ambassador for the truth. </cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	the book of secrets

**i.**

It was a Wednesday around eleven o'clock when the mail was delivered; it was neither rainy nor sunny, neither hot nor cold, but just a day, a Wednesday, the middle of a week in the middle of a month in the middle of a year. Amongst the bills and the credit card offers and the catalogues and fliers was an envelope that had been forwarded many times, and so the front was covered in stamps and stickers and ink. When he turned it over, he saw that the envelope had lipstick on the flap, not like a kiss mark, nothing so flagrant, but like she'd let her lips graze over the paper as she licked the glue. It was plum purple on a fine white envelope and he wondered if he'd open the thing to find sheets saturated with perfume and artful lies, or would he find a letter just as carelessly perfect as that overripe smudge?

He couldn't bear to find out if he was wrong, so he put the letter in the drawer where he kept old subway tokens, expired coupons and the twist ties from innumerable bags of bread, and let the illusion wait, as yet unbroken.

 

 **ii.**

"Sometimes," Viggo confesses to the mirror above the dresser, to a reflection that is mostly his face, but partly the curve of someone else's shoulder, "I make a list of all the words that I can think of that begin with O, because they all remind me of you. Open. Olive. Orgasm. Orison. Only. Ocean… There's more, I can't remember them all right now. But."

"Isn't," Orlando answers, rolling on his belly and propping himself on his elbows, "isn't there an O word that means, like, heavy or difficult, a pain in the arse?"

Viggo nods. There is no water in the ewer; there is a fine layer of dust on the linen runner. "Onerous. It means, it means burdensome. Troublesome."

"Yeah. Onerous."

"But it's not on my list, so it isn't true."

"Maybe. Maybe." Orlando rolls his head around, a lazy revolution of cracking vertebra. "I think of words, sometimes. Ones I learned, from different people, and they always make me think of them, of the people, I mean."

The bed creaks when Viggo settles again. He puts his chin in his hand. "What words are mine?" he asks, and he feels foolish.

Orlando smiles. "All of them are."

 

 **iii.**

He carries a black stone, once rough and jagged, now smooth from handling, from years and miles and care. It sometimes rides in his left front pocket, and sometimes in his right; he will button it into the back pocket of his fancy trousers or wrap it in a handkerchief tucked in the inside pocket of his evening coat.

At night, when the work is done, when the phones are quiet and the telly is off and he is blessedly alone, he will take the stone out and put it just so in the middle of his dresser-top. It always looks terribly small there, in the expanse of dark wood that is polished bright and slick as glass.

Sometimes as he meditates before bed he imagines that the dresser-top is the universe, and that he is that pebble: small, yes, and dumb and dark and shiny only on the outside. He imagines that he is immovable there, even as tiny as he is.

Sometimes he's content to know that it's only a bit of driveway gravel, from a place far away, the pair of initials once carved on the underside now worn away by the loving press of his thumb.

 

 **iv.**

In the dark we are both the same, we are both just limbs and skin and tongues and teeth. We are pulse points fluttering under thin veils of mortality. When you press your fingers there, there, there, when you feel the blood rushing under the skin? It's the same as yours. It beats the same when I touch you. It moves the same through our veins.

In the dark we would both bleed black.

In the dark our breaths are one cloud of smoke.

In the dark we are the same height, we are the same weight. It doesn't matter whose hands earlier held a paintbrush and shaped the curves of shoulders and elbows, or whose hands earlier traced lines of poetry, lips moving with the syllables and pausing with the rests. It doesn't matter who first kissed whom, who knocked the other into a doorknob in the haste of his need, whose shoes refused to come untied or whose hands shook at the first touch. There is no age and there is no clock and all minutes are hours, all hours are years.

In the dark I am you, and you are me.

In the dark we are together.

 

 **v.**

Sometimes stones would speak riddles and the earth would mumble and mutter and moan about its many aches. Sometimes trees whispered and laughed and pointed when he tripped on a root; sometimes there was a bush that confessed its ambition to be a forest, or a sparrow would declaim - to the titters of its brethren - that it was once a great falcon, and rode to the hunt on its master's wrist.

When he told these things to his lover, in a whisper so that the campfire wouldn't hear and tell the grass, Viggo didn't mock or ridicule the way that Orlando had feared. Viggo only nodded, only leaned in close and licked the taste of cheap red wine off Orlando's lips; Orlando sighed, and the wind sighed back, murmured something about new loves and old forests. The earth offered blessings and bawdy advice; the campfire did notice after all, but kept its opinion to itself.

The next day the sun was bright and warm but would not sing for Orlando when he asked it, so he returned, feeling rejected, to his lover. Viggo advised that he wait, and ask again on a day when he was not such obvious competition.

 

 **vi.**

There is a story they tell, here and there in taverns and around fires, at bed-sides and supper-times, told as if it were true although many suspect it isn't. An allegory, a parable, a metaphor for something we don't quite understand.

Once upon a time there was a man who ruled a vast kingdom with nothing but his smile. Once upon a time there was a wandering knight who'd thrown off his titles, a man that some called fool. Some say they were lovers once, in another land, but that isn't the tale I've to tell; this is what happened later, when past was forgotten.

Once upon a time the young king was struck a blow that should have killed any mortal, but he did not die: he clung to his soul. It was years and days before the wound began to bleed, but when it did, only a cup in the hand of a fool could save him.

Once upon a time. It means _this never happened_ , but it did, and I know. This is not my story, but the story of one like me, and I will tell it.

A legend is but an ambassador for the truth.

 

 **vii.**

Early one morning he remembers a girl, a potter who worked in a shed by the sea.

He would hang about in the doorway shoved shoulder to shoulder with her other suitors: a painter, a lawyer, a fisherman; a baker, a poet, a grocer. She sat at her wheel with her back to them, her red braid hanging heavy down her back; the strap of her dress would fall off her shoulder while she worked, and she sat with the skirt drawn up, her knees parted around the bowl. When she'd splash in the water and it would run down her plump tanned arms, sluicing through the caked-white clay, seven men would shake and sigh.

They each brought her tokens, timid chipmunks with acorns for the queen, all except for Viggo, who had neither money nor trade, only hope. One day he picked a flower, for the red-gold petals reminded him of her hair, her skin; he hadn't meant it as a gift but on seeing it she accepted the bloom, where she had rejected all other offerings, and took him back to her rooms.

He thinks it might not have been so delightful had it not been so unexpected.

 

 **viii.**

Steam rises from the wet pavement in the alley below, and the air is filled with that city smell, that diesel cement oil garbage smell of New York after a thunderstorm. It is August, it is Thursday, it is not quite afternoon. Viggo stubs his cigarettes out on the windowsill, and then pokes them out through the crack next to the air conditioner.

He is a little sad and a little hungry; there is an ache just at his temples because he hasn't had any caffeine yet. Orlando refuses to get out of bed, and Viggo refuses to order in when there is a perfectly good diner nearby.

They toss a coin every few hours, and Orlando always wins.

"The Mets lost last night," he says, looking out the window and up at the purple sky.

Orlando smiles and shrugs. "Oh? You know I don't follow American football." He crooks his finger at Viggo. "Come on, come back to bed. Tell me a story."

So they rearrange their sweaty limbs, and plump up the limp pillows, and Viggo lets Orlando's breath set the pace of his story, which starts quite gently and ends rather abruptly when the rain comes again.

 

 **ix.**

> To accelerate an object is to change its velocity over a period of time. In this strict scientific sense, acceleration can have positive and negative values - respectively called acceleration and deceleration in common speech - as well as change of direction. Acceleration is defined technically as "the rate of change of velocity of an object with respect to time."

\- Don't you think we're moving too fast?  
\- I don't think I want to slow down.

> Transverse acceleration (perpendicular to velocity) causes change in direction. If it is constant in magnitude and changing in direction with the velocity, we get a circular motion.

\- I just think... I think we'd do better as just. Just friends.  
\- Didn't we try that? Didn't we end up right back here?

> Accelerating acceleration or "jerk" is the rate of change of an object's acceleration over time.

\- please yes please   
\- fuck wait no   
\- yes faster oh oh  
\- wait oh God God

> In classical mechanics, acceleration _a_ is related to force _F_ and mass _m_ (assumed to be constant) by way of Newton's second law: _F = m·a_

\- I don't want to stop. I don't want it to be over.   
\- Then it doesn't. It isn't.   
\- It can't be that simple.   
\- But it is.

 

 **x.**

If you could go just so down that road, and so and so until you came to a certain port, and if you then took a ship and sailed as though you were only interested in getting from one shore to the other, you might find yourself cast upon a rock, which is the very place where East meets West, and you would find on that rock a topless tower of luminous white stone.

Inside the structure is a great wooden mechanism, and it is manned by two whose task is to move the sun. In the morning they turn the gears so, around and around until the sun is at its peak; then they reverse and turn the gears _so_ , until the sun rests once again in its place there, where the world ends.

And I have heard it from wise men, that those two were once lovers who cast themselves into the sea. That, washing up on the rock, they offered a swap to the guardians of old, saying, _We will turn your task forever and one day, as long as we may remain together._

And so it was, and so it is, and more I cannot say.

**Author's Note:**

> the cited text in chapter ix is from [wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceleration)


End file.
